Ben Brubaker in Quanta:

How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake anywhere, an expert who reads the proof carefully should be able to spot it. Otherwise, the proof must be valid. Mathematicians have been following this basic approach for well over 2,000 years.

Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, computer scientists reimagined what a proof could be. They developed a dizzying variety of new approaches, and when the dust settled, two inventions loomed especially large: zero-knowledge proofs, which can convince a skeptic that a statement is true without revealing why it is true, and probabilistically checkable proofs, which can persuade a reader of the truth of a proof even if they only see a few tiny snippets of it.

“These are, to me, two of the most beautiful notions in all of theoretical computer science,” said Tom Gur(opens a new tab), a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge.

More here.

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Enzo Traverso at Literary Hub:

The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient prejudice that in the context of a Middle East crisis is staging a resurgence. No, they describe a gigantic wave of antisemitism that has been sweeping across the globe since October 7. Its epicenter is on American college campuses, just as the epicenter of the anti–Vietnam War movement was on college campuses sixty years ago.

The New York Times has published a number of articles making the analogy between the current antiwar demonstrations and the earlier ones. The comparison is fair enough, since the United States has not seen protests on this scale since the Vietnam War. Students are well aware of this. In the 1960s, an American army was engaged in war in Southeast Asia; today, Israel is destroying Gaza with weapons supplied by the United States.

Like their predecessors, today’s students understand that their involvement is crucial to stopping the massacre, that their demonstrations are not mere gestures of solidarity but an uprising organically linked to the Palestinian resistance. In both cases, these movements have been violently denounced, and even repressed.

More here.

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Pankaj Mishra at n+1:

At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.

Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”

more here.

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Marta Figlerowicz at the Paris Review:

Like her other works—including Sister Deborah, the English translation of which is forthcoming from Archipelago later this month—Cockroaches is a reckoning with history, a steadfast commemoration of a community and culture that others tried to eradicate. But even in her debut, which many early critics read as a straightforward work of testimony about the Tutsi genocide, there is a deeply self-questioning quality to that work of commemoration. The narrator always wakes from her nightmare just as she is about to perish at the hands of her pursuers, who have already killed the other Tutsi girls fleeing alongside her. She thinks, “I know I’m going to fall, I’m going to be trampled”; and yet each night she reopens her eyes and her surroundings contradict this conviction. Why was she chosen to survive, and who did the choosing?

Mukasonga’s writing obsessively tries to answer this question, to justify but also to understand the reasons for her survival. Being spared from the genocide looms over her as an unaccountable miracle and as a heavy burden of mourning.

more here.

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Rachel Fraser in aeon:

Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character.

Part of living well, though, is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? Aristotle – whose works remain a touchstone for contemporary virtue theorists – certainly thought so.

More here.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells¹. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. This advance is the first step towards mass production of such therapies.

One of the recipients, Mr Gong, a 57-year-old man from Shanghai, has systemic sclerosis, which affects connective tissue and can result in skin stiffening and organ damage. He says that three days after receiving the therapy, he felt his skin loosen and he could start moving his fingers and opening his mouth again. Two weeks later, he returned to his office job. “I feel very good,” he says, more than a year after receiving the treatment.

More here.

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Over at Princeton University Press’s Ideas Podcast, an interview with Paul North and Paul Reitter, editors of the new translation of Capital Volume 1, and Simon Vance:

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy.

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Hal Foster in Sidecar:

Richard Serra, who died in March of this year at the age of eighty-five, sought out the resistance of other voices, in part to clarify his own. The composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich performed that role early on, as did the artist Robert Smithson. Critics and curators like Rosalind Krauss, David Sylvester and Kirk Varnedoe stepped up later, and for six decades his wife Clara Serra was his essential interlocutor. I, too, was lucky enough to be in dialogue with Serra for many years; it was one of the great adventures of my life as a critic. At times, though, it was harrowing; my private title for our 2018 book Conversations about Sculpture was ‘Godzilla Meets Bambi.’ But Serra was no monster, and I learned not to shy away from his challenges. Our book works, to the extent that it does, because we agree just enough so that, when we disagree, the differences count.

One issue we debated is the difference between site and context. ‘Might you be so inside your language,’ I asked Serra, ‘so attuned to its nuances, that you’re not alert enough to conditions that are already there, embedded in the context – conditions that are social, economic, and political?’

‘If you go into a community to make a work,’ he replied, ‘and you try to follow the demands of the local people, which are never homogeneous anyway, you end up serving their interests more than your own. And usually their interests are transitory . . . So you have to hold fast to your work.’

More here.

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Simon Torracinta in Boston Review:

When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he responded that we should “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her reply: “We are not Denmark.” Yet Sanders kept the line, and his odes to the shining example of Nordic social democracy remained an exhaustive refrain throughout his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. The theme was unsurprising: ever since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt hailed Sweden’s “middle way” between capitalism and communism, Scandinavia has been a fixture in the American left-liberal imaginary.

What’s not to like about Sweden? Its parents benefit from a total of 16 months leave for a newborn child, which they can divide among themselves, 13 months of which are paid at 80 percent of income. Income inequality, though rising, is moderate by international standards, and measurable gender inequalities are notably small. The country consistently scores near the top of global indexes of “happiness’” and “quality of life.” Union density stands at 69 percent, approximately seven times that of the United States and the second-highest rate anywhere in the world. In a continent in which left-of-center parties have been buffeted by populist and far-right upsurges and the once-flagship parties of the left like the French socialists are hollow shells of their former selves, the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAP) looks comparatively resilient. It has continued to command roughly 30 percent of the vote in elections over the last decade and has led the national government for half of the last twenty years.

Seen from another angle, however, the country looks very different.

More here,

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Astra Taylor in The Nation:

Early in January at Le Mars, in northwestern Iowa, a mob of a thousand farmers seized the attorney for an insurance company, dangled a rope before his eyes, and threatened him with immediate lynching.” So begins an article by the journalist Charlotte Prescott, published in The Nation in February of 1933. In the first paragraph, Prescott informs her readers that the protesters then “held the judge of the district court a prisoner in his chambers and defied the county sheriff.” She also notes that the farmers won: Soon after, local officials withdrew foreclosure proceedings against one farmer and tossed out a judgment against another. A “social revolution in the cornfields of Iowa,” a wholesale revolt of the rural population against the authorities, was under way.

The Iowa rebellion was no isolated skirmish. In the 1930s, indebted farmers fought foreclosure across the heartland. They organized to protect one another’s homes and livelihoods and campaigned for politicians who vowed to represent their interests, preventing land seizures through direct action and at the ballot box. Yet as impressive as this surge of populist fervor was, it represented only one chapter in a much longer conflict between debtors and creditors in the United States—a conflict that is foundational to American politics and yet, for some reason, is mostly forgotten.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief, a fascinating new book by Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, seeks to recover this history.

More here.

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The Dance

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

by William Carlos Williams
from Selected Poems
New Directions Paperbook, 1949

Breughel’s painting: The Kermess

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Lizette Ortega in The Washington Post:

Scientists discovered that bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source, a finding that researchers hope could be a promising answer to combat one of Earth’s major pollution problems. In a study published Thursday in Environmental Science and Technology, scientists laid out their examination of Comamonas testosteroni, a bacteria that grows on polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a plastic commonly found in single-use food packaging and water bottles. PET makes up about 12 percent of global solid waste and 90 million tons of the plastic produced each year.

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Amitava Kumar at his Substack:

“McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s play that just opened at Lincoln Center, stars Robert Downey Jr. in the role of a novelist named Jacob McNeal.

The set is bathed in the soft blue glow of an iPhone screen. In fact, when the play starts in the dark, the backdrop is a phone screen on which with the tapping sounds of an iPhone keyboard we see the moving cursor form the following question: “Who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?”

The GPT responds: “The selection process for the Nobel is highly secretive…. As an AI language model, I cannot accurately predict the recipient of the Nobel Prize or any other future event. I’m sorry.”

The person typing these words is, of course, the play’s protagonist himself. A prominent novelist in his sixties, Jacob McNeal. He is about to arrive at his doctor’s where he is being treated for Stage 3 liver disease. He has gone back to drinking because the month of October, when the Nobel is announced, is a tough month for him. He’s in serious trouble, the doctor says; the AI model called Suarez that tracks liver function has McNeal ending with liver failure within three months.

I must pause here and note a couple of things.

More here.

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Kerri Smith & Chris Ryan in Nature:

The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars.

Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nobel prizes can be shared by up to three people) to work out which characteristics can be reliably linked to medals.

More here.

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